Ruby knows she's not supposed to get hit. Ever. Her fighting style, well, technically Uncle Qrow's style, is suited for quick assault and slice-and-dice and propelling her momentum so that she's a human-sized lawn mower. Except more lethal and aimed at more than just the ground.
That was how Uncle Qrow described it when she'd laughed at his metaphor. Then he promptly put her in her place.
That's why, when she flies towards the howling dragon Grimm at least twenty times her size swinging claws as big as Yang herself, her mind jumps to her instinctual training to simply fire another bullet and propel herself in a different direction. But that option is not an option. Unthinkable. So she swallows years of knee-jerk reactions and closes her eyes, feels the wind flowing through her hair and thinks how Uncle Qrow would have bit her ear off for what comes next.
Her silver eyes open and meet shocked ice. Then her neck snaps and shoulders jerk and hips shudder as her body sends Weiss to the side, to safety, before she whips her arms up and does her best to deflect the dragon's claw with Crescent Rose.
"If you ever get hit," she hears from a distant memory, echoing in her ears, "you'll most likely die."
Blinding pain. A scream torn from her throat, despite her best efforts to focus through the daggers of agony on her skin and eye, and the world goes white for one single, miniscule second.
"If that happens, make sure you take the bastard with you."
She smiles.
When she next comes to, the moons and the sparkling sky greet her blurry vision, and while her mind catches up to speed, she enjoys the breathtaking view with a blank, empty soul and relishes in how the stars fill it back with life. Reminds her of days gone by, of good memories and bad, and that is when it all comes back.
She can't help the gasp that escapes her throat when the full force of the pain throbs alongside her beating heart and flowing bloodstream.
"Did you find her yet?" someone calls in the distance, sounding strainedly calm.
"No!" someone else fires back, burning with anger and… was it worry or irritation or both?
She hears branches crack. A pause.
"I found her." But this person has merely breathed the statement out, and when they don't immediately call out to the others, Ruby knows who it is.
She waits until the soft pattering of footsteps on damp dirt stops next to her ears before weakly managing a, "Hey, Weiss," and takes in the pale girl's form, drenched in crimson from head to toe, her beautiful white hair caked to her body and tumbled down out of its usual ponytail. Some primal part of her being is strangely pleased at the sight, then it strikes her that blood usually means wounds, and wounds mean Weiss is hurt, and the words tumble out of her mouth as she tries to sit up, "Weiss, are you okay?"
But she forgets her own grave injuries in that one moment, and her body goes limp and her mind freezes as the torrent of unimaginable pain shoots through her skull.
Weiss catches her before she falls back and smashes her head into the ground. Her arms are trembling, legs kneeling, boots crunching on the forest's dirt floor. "Am I okay?" she whispers, cold, icy, voice shaking, blue eyes piercing. Yet to Ruby's surprise, all the anger vanishes in the tired, guilty exhale that follows. "Am I okay?" she repeats, softer, quieter.
Ruby doesn't know if she is supposed to answer or not.
In the end, she settles for grasping one trembling arm – "Are you?" – and can't stop the need from seeping into her voice.
Weiss looks at her for one long minute. Pulls Ruby a little closer to her and sets her head down in her lap. Takes a hand and gently brushes Ruby's bangs away from her forehead and hovers, quivering, above the area of injury. Ruby watches her pale throat contract with a thick swallow, her blue pupils focus and unfocus, and how she tries to pretend that what she is seeing isn't real. Can't be real. And in a way, it all feels almost like a nightmare she can wake up and forget if it isn't for the constant thrum of agony throbbing and waning every other second.
It isn't long after that the tears fall, one by one, like heavy snowflakes sparkling in the bright night sky, falling more and more rapidly until it is a blizzard of released frustration and guilt and...
"The right side of your face is– I mean– Your eye– And you ask me if I'm okay?"
Sobs choke Weiss's words and send her bloody form shuddering and shaking, but Ruby understands. She doesn't want to think about her own injuries, not really, and her concern for Weiss is at once both selfish and selfless. She struggles through the haze of blood-loss induced lightheadedness, and focuses on the pain, channels it.
"I'm sorry." Sob. "I'm so sorry." Sob. "It's all my fault." Sob.
No, she wants to tell her, no it isn't. If it was any of us in there, you'd have done the same. At least I had the scythe. I blocked most of the damage.
Instead, she grasps at Weiss's bloodstained collar and simply stares, only stares, into her eyes and memorizes the way they glint and shimmer, the exact shade of ice they are and how they quiver under her gaze. If she dies, she wants to die seeing this.
Weiss points a hand up to the night sky and sends a single flare of white light into the air, then begins to quietly recount what happened after she was sent sprawling to the side. Anything to distract from the pain. Anything to distract from the guilt. She tells her that all the blood she is drenched in is the result of Crescent Rose, that when Ruby was struck, she swung her scythe with enough power to cleave the dragon's claw off from the wrist down. Roaring, the dragon had whirled its tail around and launched Ruby off into the distance out of rage, and Weiss and the other two were left to deal with the severely crippled and extremely infuriated beast.
They'd been looking for her for at least an hour. The beast had fallen in less than 5 minutes, in comparison, thanks to the combined efforts of an equally enraged Yang and wrathful Blake.
Recounting the tale doesn't help with Weiss's mental health, Ruby is sure, so she moves the topic onto stupid, sillier things. Like how Weiss stinks and needs a shower, and to her relief, Weiss responds in typical affronted fashion. They share a bit of playful, familiar banter, reminiscent of days long gone by, and die off into peaceful speechlessness once they've exhausted their retorts and Ruby feels the exhaustion and blood loss setting in. It doesn't help that Weiss's lap is so comfortable and warm, either.
When she finally hears Yang's boots fall heavily on the dirt floor and Blake's near silent exclamation of "Oh no, no", she can't keep her eyes open any longer, so she stops holding onto consciousness and slips into blissful rest. Hopefully not permanently, she thinks to herself, and that thought follows her into her dreams.
She wakes later on to the smell of something burning, and her first thoughts are of Yang and whoever she decided is her victim this time.
To her immense, complete, utter and shocked surprise, she opens her eyes to see pale, curved skin bathed in the light of a dim, crackling fire spitting tiny glowing red specks into the air, and she tries in vain to keep her eyes locked onto those little embers of dying light.
She loses the battle, of course, and she greedily, guiltily, watches Weiss's exposed body with an intensity that frightens herself. The faint outlines of muscle move ever so slightly with each breath her body intakes, and her eyes travel over every inch of skin that isn't covered by her long, flowing white hair. She's beautiful. So beautiful. Beautiful enough to be frozen in a block of ice and preserved for whatever is left of humanity after the war.
The blood is gone from her hair, she realizes, the burning she smells is the burning of fabric, and the pieces fall into place. Weiss is burning her clothes. She probably couldn't get all the blood off.
But most importantly, she's–
"Naked."
The look that Weiss gives her when she whips her head around is almost as priceless as the blush that follows after, her whole body changing from white to red, but Ruby is mostly focused on Weiss's entirely exposed front.
Mostly.
She recognizes the danger before it happens, but then Weiss ceases mid stride and simply stares down at her.
It is at that moment that Ruby realizes she can see. From both eyes.
Once Ruby has stopped Weiss from running into the forest to die from sheer embarrassment and wrapped her red cloak around her thin shoulders, forcing herself not to look down, not to give in to temptation, does she dare ask what happened. Weiss merely points at their two teammates slumbering soundlessly against a nearby tree, Blake snug against Yang's shoulder, ribbon askew, Yang resting her head back, mouth hung open, and says, "We fixed it. Somehow. It was… difficult."
Ruby doesn't doubt that.
Her hand moves up, hesitantly, and feels her face, marveling at the changed texture of skin around her healed eye, how much softer it is, more sensitive, strangely smooth in a jagged pattern, and reaches out to touch the similar mark of life on her companion's face, strokes her cheek gently where the skin goes from pale to scarred back to pale, revels in the texture. She's always wanted to do this.
All the while, Weiss doesn't resist the strangely intimate gesture. In fact, she closes her eyes and even seems to enjoy it, if her curling lips are any indication, and despite her best efforts at silencing the foolish hope blooming inside her chest, she lets herself believe that maybe, one day, when this is all over and everything in the world is as it should be, that perhaps, possibly, that Weiss and her could be...
She smiles, though she really shouldn't, stills her hand and chuckles a bit, and at Weiss's curious look, she whispers through her dry, chapped lips: "Look Weiss."
She points.
"We match now."
Weiss doesn't say anything, can't say anything, just reaches out and returns the favor as Ruby takes both hands and wipes the tears from her eyes, and then they're a mess of crying and cheek caressing and quiet laughter in the orange glow of the firelight of their paradise.
She wishes this moment can go on forever.
A/N: If anyone's wondering, Weiss burns her clothes so the hordes of Grimm can't smell them out. Blood is very tantalizing, yes?
Also I hate this quite a bit but SCREW IT HERE IT IS ANYWAY
This is a sort of AU of my Pieces story. Of course, this and that can both be read separately, but this is a "what-if" situation because in the Pieces world, Ruby freezes when she sees the dragon claw going for Weiss. Blake, instead, shoves Weiss to the side, and not having a giant scythe at her disposal, takes the blow pretty much head on and dies. From then on, Yang devolves in her mental state after they store Blake's body away somewhere to be temporarily buried until they have the chance to come back and give her a proper burial.
As most of you who read Pieces know, Adam takes the body himself and does who knows what with it.
Yang protects Ruby and Weiss later on from the onslaught of Grimm, but as it's just the three of them, they're down enough power to be overrun, and that is when Yang goes full-power and blows them away, destroying her own body in the process. Expending too much aura, etc (although I refer to this as going too hard as Super-Saiyan in my mind).
They hide her body and move on.
The situation leading up to Pieces is that because Ruby took the time to hide both Blake and Yang away, their adversaries had enough time to catch up and give them a hell of a beating before Ruby tells Weiss to run, "JUST GO!", and she fends them off and gets that nasty gash on her hip/leg, and barely manages to escape to safety in the snow. Weiss wants to help, of course, but she knows that fighting with Ruby might mean both of their deaths, and then no one is left to save the world, and she forces herself not to be selfish.
So it's to her relief that she follows the blood trails in the aftermath of the battle and finds Ruby alive.
Then it all goes to hell again, haha! But yeah.
This does not save team JNPR, as I previously stated that they died long before any of the RWBY girls, but I like to believe that they faked their deaths for the moment and are now waiting for the right time to strike. In this world, anyway. Although you can believe that for Pieces as well for your own sanity if you'd like!